Cooper looks to Cotham, moderate Republicans to help stop abortion limits
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is going to need Republican help for his efforts to stop the GOP’s proposed new abortion restrictions from becoming law. He doesn’t need much, but it still might be out of reach.
“All we need is one Republican, in either the House or the Senate, to support the situation on the veto,” Cooper told WRAL News in an interview Friday.
Republican lawmakers passed a bill Thursday that will now ban abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, instead of 20, as the law had been. It also has additional rules that could shut down many abortion clinics statewide.
Political calculus and gamesmanship are nothing new to the abortion restrictions, which Republicans began writing in secret months ago and then passed in a 48-hour flurry this week, limiting opportunities for the public to comment on or even learn about the new restrictions.
Democrats are now responding with their own tactics, trying to apply pressure to a handful of Republicans in swing districts.
Cooper has 10 days to veto the bill, which he has said he will do. But his chances of that veto surviving at the legislature are slim. He needs every single Democrat, and at least one Republican in either the House or Senate, to vote to block the bill from becoming law. Republicans and Democrats alike, however, often vote the party line on veto overrides.
Cooper singled out three Republicans in the House and one in the Senate — Rep. Ted Davis, Rep. John Bradford, Rep. Tricia Cotham and Sen. Michael Lee — as the ones he thinks are most likely to vote with the Democrats and keep the state’s abortion laws as-is.
He said it was based on campaign promises they made in 2022 to not further restrict abortion, and he hopes their constituents and others will now reach out to remind them of those promises. The four have the chance to either kill the bill entirely, or to leverage their position to get changes made that would lead to them helping override Cooper’s veto.
“I want these legislators to hear from the doctors,” Cooper said in the WRAL interview. “I want them to hear from the nurses. I want them to hear from the women who are going to be affected by this legislation … so that when the time comes for a veto override, these legislators can tell Republican leadership, ‘We need to go back to the drawing board.’”
One of the bill’s lead backers, Sen. Vickie Sawyer, R-Iredell, dismissed accusations that the bill is too extreme. Many European countries also have 12-week bans, she said in an interview Friday with WRAL.
“Most of the industrialized world is where we’re at,” Sawyer said. “We did not go extreme like some other states, with banning abortion at six weeks. Now, some of my Republican brethren hate — are not very excited about that. ‘We did not go far enough.’ But I say to them, we are right where North Carolina needs to be.”
Cooper’s political math
In 2022, Cotham was a Democrat. The others were, and remain, Republicans who represent some of the most competitive districts in the state. Cotham abruptly changed parties last month, saying she had become disillusioned with the Democratic Party, delivering the GOP the seat it needed to hold a veto-proof majority in the full legislature.
Bradford, Cotham and Lee appear, at least for now, as long-shots to uphold Cooper’s veto. His potential best shot is Wilmington Rep. Ted Davis, who did promise explicitly in his 2022 campaign that he would not vote to lower the state’s abortion limit below 20 weeks, even if GOP House Speaker Tim Moore pressured him to.
“The Speaker does not tell me what to do,” Davis said at a 2022 debate in Wilmington, adding: “I’m going to vote to keep it just the way it is.”
Davis kept to his word Wednesday when the House voted to pass the abortion bill. He was present for other votes that day but conspicuously absent when the abortion vote was called. So while he didn’t vote against it, he was the only Republican not to vote for it.
And if he walks again when it comes up for a veto override, the bill would fail to become law — if every Democrat votes to uphold Cooper’s veto.
Davis didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Bradford said in his 2022 campaign that he had "no intentions...to make the weeks more restrictive." But Friday, in a statement, he indicated he had no interest in doing a favor for Cooper now.
He said Cooper has already snubbed him several times in the past. The governor didn’t invite him to bill signing ceremonies for laws Bradford had been a main supporter of, Bradford said, adding that the governor ignored his requests for help with problems on a Charlotte-area toll road.
“I am serving my fourth term in the legislature and the Governor wouldn’t know me if he bumped into me,” Bradford said in a statement Friday. “In March he hosted a Down syndrome advocacy event and despite being the leading advocate for Down syndrome in the state legislature I was excluded.
“Last session, I was the primary bill sponsor for an organ donor transplant discrimination bill,” Bradford continued. “He held a public bill signing event but chose not to invite me, the number one primary sponsor and Republican, and instead invited a Democrat legislator.”
Cotham, when she flipped parties, said she felt bullied by Cooper and other Democrats. She was previously a staunch supporter of abortion rights, even using the story of her own abortion in a House floor debate to castigate Republican lawmakers several years ago. So her shocking vote in favor of the abortion bill Wednesday — months after she co-sponsored a bill to expand abortion access — indicates she’s unlikely to reverse course yet again and help Cooper block it from becoming law.
She didn’t respond to requests for comment after the vote, didn’t speak during the debate to explain her new position and didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Lee also didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it’s not clear that his vote was in violation of a campaign promise as Cooper said. Lee had promised not to vote on an abortion ban that also contained no exceptions for situations like rape, incest or to save the mother’s life; this bill has all three — and Lee was one of the lead authors of the bill.
WRAL Anchor/Reporter Lena Tillett and WRAL State Government Reporter Paul Specht contributed to this report.
